Today is the deadline to put 150 words together that could help change the direction of arts in Philadelphia.

The Knight Arts Challenge Philadelphia is a three-year, $9 million initiative of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation. We’re seeking the best ideas in the arts. We’re investing $9 million, to be matched by other funders, to impact the arts in your hometown. We are seeking the most innovative ideas in the arts to inspire and enrich Philadelphia’s communities. [Source]

Philadelphia is just the second city in which Knight is running this arts challenge, following the foundation’s home of Miami. Get your questions answered here or submit here.

On a train ride home, I brainstormed a dozen ideas for the arts challenge, seven of which I thought were clear and concise enough that they’d be worth submitting. While only a couple directly relate to my work with technology community news site Technically Philly, as venture capitalist Fred Wilson recently wrote (H/T Karl Martino), there is great cross over between a maturing creative economy and an aged arts world.

So, I find it relevant to share what I’ve submitted, which I will do below.

An open letter to President Ann Weaver Hart

I am graduating. After four years on North Broad Street – two more than you – I have plenty I want to share with you. Space is limited, so forgive my suddenness.

Throw your students into the surrounding communities.

For 45 years, this university has tried to figure out how to trick middle-class students into studying amid one of this country’s densest collections of black people, many of them poor and uneducated. So we built walls and took publicity shots facing south. We closed North Park Avenue, tried to close 13th Street and turned inward.

So, each year, a portion of accepted students confuse Temple with shootings at the Norris Apartments and confuse Philadelphia with an abandoned row home at 20th and Diamond streets.

That’s backwards. Have Provost Lisa Staiano-Coico amend our new general education requirements to involve 10-credit hours of “community education.” The engineering students can take a class on the most efficient means of backfilling condemned buildings, architecture students can figure out what’s wrong with the North Philadelphia subway stop, and students of the social sciences can work with the nonprofits that are trying to help our neighbors.

Leverage our intellectual capital and market it as the most unique academic experience in the world.

But, despite grumbling about the cost of gasoline, there isn’t any real conversation about reversing suburban development, which, as anyone can see with a drive through one of these communities, are horribly inefficient lifestyle.

We must be decades away from a different form of development, which means this country will have built that many more developments, private drives and shopping malls that offer no solution for people other than to drive.

Sadly, yesterday a man was shot by two SEPTA officers at the Allegeny Ave. stop on the Broad Street Line, my stop.This comes after reports of increases of SEPTA and city officers riding the subways, often derided as dangerous. I’ve never had a problem myself, but reports of teenage violence, particularly directed at younger riders, have been on the rise.The man was apparently smoking in the stop when the officers approached him. He tried to run and at least four shots were fired.I have video from CBS 3, but I haven’t been able to upload it on YouTube.(Photos by Greg Bezanis, a staff photographer of The Temple News)